Blog

Jun 30, 2012

Power Outage

As
you may have noticed, UnitWise was temporarily unavailable late Friday
evening and early Saturday morning. This unexpected outage was caused
due to some Violent Thunderstorms that affected sections of northern
Virginia, Maryland, and the Washington DC area. [Click Here to read more about these storms and consequential damages]Now, you may be asking why this affected UnitWise? Since we are based in Rock Hill, SC. As you may recall, we upgraded our servers in January to be hosted on the Amazon Cloud. Our
Servers on Amazon are built with many redundancies, and are throughout
the country to prevent events like this from happening. However,
technology can only come so far when faced with a natural disaster or
act of God. In this situation, one of Amazon’s Data Centers located in
northern Virginia suffered from a severe electrical storm that impacted
both utility power and multiple backup generators.UnitWise
was not alone in this brief outage. Other companies such as Netflix,
Pinterest, and Instagram all experienced significant downtime Friday
night and Saturday morning due to these thunderstorms in north Virginia
that affected our shared Amazon Data Center. As
of this morning UnitWise was up and running properly thanks to the
diligence of our programming team that has been working through the
night and weekend with very little sleep to make sure that UnitWise is
up and running properly. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are
still thankful that this issue was able to be resolved in only a few
hours. If you have further questions about this, you can contact us at heroes@unitwise.com or give us a call at 704.234.6006